Editor’s note: This is the fifth of six lectures given by H.A.L. Fisher at the University of London in June, 1907. They were published in book form under the title, Bonapartism (London, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1908).
(Continued from Part 4)
Louis Bonaparte, the nephew of Napoleon, was the third son of Louis, the ex-King of Holland, and his wife Hortense Beauharnais. He was born in 1808, recollected having seen his illustrious uncle before the Battle of Waterloo, and was carefully educated in the Napoleonic cult. Lord Malmesbury, meeting him at his mother’s house in Rome in 1829, found him already persuaded that it was his destiny to rule over France. He was then twenty-one years of age, a finished but reckless horseman, giving little indication of ability or knowledge, but high-spirited, and surrounded by a nimbus of madcap generals who had served under the great Napoleon. His mother’s house in Rome was a centre of nationalist politics, and in 1831 Louis Bonaparte, together with Charles Napoleon, his elder surviving brother, took part in the rising in the Romagna which came to so swift and unsatisfactory a conclusion. The French Revolution of 1830 prompted him to enter into relations with the Republican chiefs in Paris, and in the following year, by the death of the Duke of Reichstadt, he became heir to the imperial claims. Henceforward he began to study politics, and impressed Chateaubriand as ‘studious, instructed, full of honour, and naturally grave, awaiting in the silence of exile the liberation of his country’. The Revolution of 1830 had been partially led by Bonapartists, and Louis Bonaparte was convinced that but for an untimely accident it would have resulted in the re-establishment of the imperial dynasty. On two separate occasions he attempted to appeal from the government of France to the people and the army. In 1836 he was taken red-handed at Strasburg, having failed to suborn the garrison. In 1840, an enterprise carried out with a similar lack of circumspection failed ignobly at Boulogne. These disastrous miscarriages were sufficient to ruin a reputation. Louis Bonaparte had not only grossly miscalculated the elementary conditions of success, but he had appeared in a ridiculous and melodramatic light as a hare-brained adventurer. Nevertheless there is something impressive in the pertinacity of his fatalism, and in the skill with which, when placed upon his trial in 1840, he contrived to define his political position. One last word, gentlemen. I represent before you a principle, a cause, and a defeat. The principle is the sovereignty of the people; the cause, that of the Empire; the defeat, Waterloo. You have recognized the principle, you have served the cause, you wish to avenge the defeat.’ He maintained that he desired not to bring about an imperial restoration, but to convoke a national congress which should decide upon the political destinies of France.
The sentence passed upon the adventurer was imprisonment in the castle of Ham. The Government of Louis Philippe had been over-generous to him after the affair of Strasburg, and even now was not ungenerous. It permitted him to receive visitors, to keep a valet, to walk in the garden, and to ride in the castle court. Imprisonment gave time for study, and Lord Malmesbury, who visited Ham in 1845, was struck by the fact that, despite five years of close confinement, his mind was full and active, and his conviction of ultimate success as firm as ever. He composed a pamphlet on the extinction of pauperism by means of a scheme for the reclamation of waste land by state-aided agricultural colonies. He wrote a protectionist treatise on the sugar question, contributed articles to a local newspaper on military reform, and was full of a project for a Nicaraguan canal. Divining with no little perspicacity the trend of public opinion, he talked to Louis Blanc with a sympathetic air of the prospects of Socialism, advertised himself as the friend of the poor and as the possessor of various patents for the relief of poverty. His uncle had, as he had already explained in his work on Napoleonic ideas, designed to introduce liberal changes into his Government. He would complete his uncle’s work by a well-connected scheme of social reform. In 1847 he escaped from prison in the guise of a workman, and reappeared in London in time to enroll himself as a special constable during the Chartist riots. His appearance was not impressive. His legs were short, his eye dull, his face curiously inexpressive. His mother had described him as soft and obstinate, and his friend Mrs. Gordon told Louis Blanc that he had upon her the effect of a woman. To many he appeared dreamy, reserved, opaque. He was known to be given to dissipation, and yet so destitute was he of the dash and animation which belonged to the French temperament that scandal doubted his parentage and invented for his father a Dutch admiral.
The Revolution of February, 1848, which shook down the throne of Louis Philippe, provided an incomparable opportunity to a political adventurer. A servile war had followed upon a political agitation for parliamentary reform, a revolt of the ‘have-nots’ against the ‘haves’ which threatened property and all the foundations of civilized life. As early as 1846, Heine, strolling through the Quartier St. Marceau, was struck with the ferocious literature which appeared to be the pabulum of the Paris workman. There were cheap reprints of the most sanguinary speeches of Marat and Robespierre, as well as the literature of Socialism, of which Louis Blanc’s Organisation du travail was the most influential manifestation. The terror which the social revolution inspired cannot easily be overestimated. In the country districts many a peasant was well content that Louis Philippe should go, but thought it intolerable that France should be governed by the reds of Paris. The assembly which was sent to the capital to draft a constitution was conservative to the backbone, and the fear of Socialism which seized every peasant proprietor in France gave Louis Napoleon the opportunity for which he was waiting. At the first tidings of the Revolution he had crossed the Channel, but then, learning that his presence was inconvenient, discreetly returned to London. His name began to work miracles. Twice he was elected to the Constituent Assembly, but twice refused to take his seat; then being chosen by five departments he accepted the mandate, and showed himself to the men who were drawing up the constitution of the Second Republic. His first speech, delivered, it was said, with a German accent, was hesitating and bad. ‘I thought,’ said Thouret, ‘this man was dangerous; after hearing him I withdraw my amendment.’
The man was dangerous. The Constituent Assembly devised a Republican constitution which could only lead to a dictatorship. On the one hand, there was to be a legislature, elected by universal suffrage; on the other hand, a president deriving his authority independently from the same ultimate and original source of sovereign power. Since the President would control the centralized administrative mechanism and the armed forces of the country, he would during his four years of office be in a position of commanding pre-eminence. When the question of the presidency was submitted to the electorate, Louis Bonaparte was returned at the head of the poll with more than five million votes. Some of the peasants who voted for him believed that he was the great Napoleon himself. Every one at least knew his name, He obtained the suffrage of all who dreaded the red spectre of Socialism, the Legitimists and Orleanists, the Bonapartists and the Catholics. He stood as the candidate of the peasantry and the army, as the heir of a great tradition, as the pledge of vague, unmeasured aspirations. ‘How should I not vote for this gentleman,’ said a peasant to Montalembert, ‘I whose nose was frozen at Moscow?’ Lamartine the poet, orator, and historian, who had saved France in the crisis of 1848, polled no more than eighteen thousand votes. Cavaignac had crushed the Socialists in Paris during the days of June and had earned a tribute of gratitude from all who value order and liberty; Ledru-Rollin represented the principle of social democracy; but all the Republican votes together did not exceed two million. Bonaparte had easily eclipsed his rivals. To understand his success, we must think, as Treitschke reminds us, of the songs which the peasant women of France had sung at their looms, and of the cottage walls hung with cheap lithographs of the triumphs and the paladins of the Napoleonic wars. The situation created in the spring of 1849 was extraordinary. The first assembly which met under the new Republican constitution was a body of men which did not even wish for a republic. Universal suffrage had returned a Monarchist majority, and the Republicans were compelled to the conclusion that the errors of universal suffrage should be corrected by force. The constitution provided that a three-fourths majority was necessary to decree constitutional revision, and, with the exception of a small minority, every one wished to revise the constitution—the Prince President, that he might prolong his term of office; the Legitimists and Orleanists, that they might crown their respective candidates; the social democrats, that they might extend the popular principle. Yet opinion was too sharply divided to admit of the requisite majority, and in order to reform the constitution it became necessary to violate it.
With a greater supply of commanding energy the Prince President might easily have wrecked his cause, and at this great crisis of his fortunes he was helped by his principal defect, a certain irresolute languor of will. He was silent and reserved in Paris, and his rare attempts to intervene in the current of parliamentary politics were favourably contrasted in the public mind with the febrile activities of the Assembly. Every month added to his reputation and detracted from that of his adversaries. The Assembly, stricken with the fear of democracy, muzzled the Press, prohibited public meetings, and disfranchised three million citizens. The President, on the other hand, toured through the country, protested that he was the friend of the workman, and that nothing would induce him to violate the forms of the Constitution. Being possessed of control over the army and the executive, he was in reality master of France, and the conduct of the legislature had equipped him with apologies should he decide to use force. He could say, as he said to his friend Lord Malmesbury, that he had tried in vain to form a coalition ministry and to effect a fusion of parties, and that parliamentary agitation stood in the way of social reform. From an assembly which had disfranchised three million voters and voted itself a gratuity of twenty-five francs a day, he could appeal to the democracy of France. Yet he hesitated with a not unnatural hesitation. He felt solitary. When he first came to France in 1848 he was not known to fifty persons, and he had a talent for distrusting and for inspiring distrust. The Coup d’État, executed on December 2, 1852, the anniversary of Austerlitz, was imparted only to five confidants.
Uncle and nephew established themselves in the government of France by a Coup d’État, but whereas the days of Brumaire were bloodless, the days of December left memories which France has not yet expunged from the tablets of her heart. The plot of Brumaire was so clumsily contrived that it nearly miscarried; the plot of December was a miracle of craft and force such as would have approved itself to the judgement of Cesare Borgia. Yet Brumaire was forgiven in the greatness of the achievements to which it was the prelude, while the bloodstain of December proved to be indelible. We must not take our history from Victor Hugo or Gambetta, from L’Histoire d’un Crime or Napoleon le Petit or Les Châtiments, but the state of mind of which these famous pieces of invective were the product was part of the spiritual current in French history.
A cry of execration rose up in England.
If you be fearful, then must we be bold,
Our Britain cannot salve a tyrant o’er.
Better the waste Atlantic roll’d
On her and us and ours for evermore.
What! have we fought for freedom from our prime
At last to dodge and palter with a public crime?
So wrote Tennyson, addressing the legislators of England.
The ‘public crime’ was condoned in France. There it was felt that the President stood between the State and anarchy; that his severities had crushed a vast socialistic conspiracy, and that there was no alternative but to register his will. The plébiscite made him President for ten years and confirmed the principles of an autocratic constitution framed upon the avuncular model. The President was given sole power over army and navy. It was he who exercised all the patronage, named the members of the Council of State and the Senate, had the sole right of initiating, sanctioning, and promulgating laws, of summoning, proroguing, and dissolving the legislature. In the fullest and most absolute sense he was the master of France. The legislature of 251 members, though elected for six years by universal suffrage, was not only debarred from initiating laws; it was forbidden to debate the Address, to interpellate ministers, to overthrow a ministry. It was indeed permissible to proffer amendments, but these the Council of State was not obliged to accept and was in the habit of systematically disregarding. No measure which could be taken to reduce the importance of the body was left unexplored. There was no tribune; no reporting, save for dry and condensed official summaries in the official paper. The aspect of the Palais Bourbon had indeed changed. The profession of the rhetorician was gone. How could his spirit play as he rose from his seat to address three government officials seated in their gold braid above the thin and dispirited assembly? Montalembert, the great Zouave of Catholicism, approved the Coup d’État as necessary to save France from the abysm; but the restrictions upon the exercise of his rhetorical talents drove him into opposition.
It is never wise to forget the ugly features of such a despotism as that which Napoleon now set up in France—the debasement of the bar and the bench, the oppression exercised by the officials, the cynical immorality of the Court, the absence of large and generous principles in public life. In palliation it may be said that the country itself seemed to care little for parliamentary forms or the freedom of the Press, and was unmoved by the unscrupulous pressure exerted by the Government at elections. The Chamber was for the most part inexperienced and docile, for the eminent Bonapartists sat in the Senate and the more laborious members of the party were summoned to the Council. As the great issues were removed from the sphere of legislative responsibility, personal jealousies filled the vacuum. ‘The present régime,’ wrote De Tocqueville, ‘is the paradise of the envious and the mediocre.’ The intellect of France had been warned off the course, the politicians took refuge in letters, and only in the veiled references of the savants of the Institute could the most cultured city in the world taste the subtle delight of delicate and forbidden criticism.
The substitution of the Empire for the Presidency was the work of less than a year, prefaced by many petitions and brought to a head by a triumphal progress through France. On October 9, 1852, at a banquet given by the Chamber of Commerce at Bordeaux, Louis Bonaparte proclaimed the Empire, adding the significant words, ‘L’Empire c’est la Paix’. The French nation, being consulted for the third time, for the third time by an overwhelming majority ratified its belief in Bonapartism. On December 1, 1852, the Prince President was proclaimed Emperor under the title Napoleon III.
The programme of the Empire was not the improvisation of a vulgar adventurer, but the result of long reflection on the Napoleonic tradition and on the best means of adapting it to the needs of France. ‘The name Napoleon,’ so ran the message of October 31, 1849, ‘is a complete programme in itself; it stands for order, authority, religion, the welfare of the people within; without, for national dignity.’ Napoleon professed himself to be the elect of the people, and ready to abandon his prerogatives at their desire. It was necessary that he should begin his career as Emperor by depriving the country of that exercise of political liberty which in his judgement had been so fatal to France ever since the Battle of Waterloo; but by degrees he would limit his prerogatives and admit the nation to a share in government. Like his uncle, he had come not to suppress but to adjourn the reign of political freedom and to educate the French people in the art of combining self-government, progress, and order.
The Napoleonic idea, as he had already explained, stood not for war but for peace. ‘I have,’ he said at Bordeaux, October 9, 1852, ‘like the Emperor, conquests to make. Like him, I wish to draw into the stream of the great popular river those hostile side-currents which tend to lose themselves without profit to any one. . . . I wish to conquer to religion, to morality, to prosperity, that part of the population, still so numerous, which in the midst of a country of faith and belief scarcely knows the precept of Christ, which in the heart of the most fertile country in the world can scarcely enjoy the prime necessities of its produce. We have immense districts of virgin soil to clear, roads to open, harbours to dig, rivers to render navigable, canals to finish, our network of railways to complete. Opposite to Marseilles there is a vast kingdom waiting to be assimilated to France. Our great ports of the West must be brought near to the American continent by the rapidity of the commerce we have yet to create. We have everywhere ruins to restore, false gods to overthrow, truths to establish in triumph. That is how I should understand the Empire, if the Empire is to be re-established.’
A despotism requires a despot. Napoleon III possessed the capacity of delineating spacious projects in elevated language; but his physical constitution, never of the strongest, failed him in the middle of his career, and with the advance of illness his will became increasingly infirm. He was a man of kindly feelings, courteous, at times charming, but neither in public nor in private morals free from grave reproach. The epicurean temperament is not favourable to the growth of deep affections, and Ollivier, who knew Napoleon well, reports that few sovereigns have been so impersonal as he. A certain stoic courage, a coolness in the hour of danger, were the complemental merits which balanced the absence of high vehemence and warm imagination. He had a certain gift of political perspective, and could paint on the canvas of the future with a bold sweep of the brush; but his figures had no anatomy, and were like the creations of the dilettante artist who has excused himself from the tough and technical discipline of his craft. His judgement was unsteady, his head full of untested, fanciful, and contradictory policies; his capacity unequal to the execution of his opaque and fluctuating designs. Having obtained power by a conspiracy, he was compelled to conspire in order to maintain it, and being unable, partly through the haziness of his intelligence and partly through the infirmity of his will, to apprehend the essential discord of opposing ideals, he harboured the strangest miscellany of convictions, despotic, revolutionary, philanthropic, and liberal. A crooked vein of diffidence shot through the stiff substance of his fatalism, and as he distrusted himself and even openly expressed regrets and misgivings, so he distrusted those around him. The diplomatists of the Empire frequently found that their master was diplomatizing behind their back, and that their counsels were thrown aside in obedience to some cross-current of unofficial influence. Such a master is not well served. In a centralized state the malady of the commanding will spreads through every vein of the body politic.
There is a curious sketch of a novel written in the Emperor’s hand and discovered among his papers at the Tuileries in 1870. A certain M. Benoist, an honest grocer, goes to America in 1847, and after a voyage from the Hudson to the Mississippi returns to France in 1868. Only distant echoes had reached him of what was going on in his native country. Some French exiles had told him that his country was groaning under the iron heel of despotism, and that, having left it flourishing under Louis Philippe, he would find it impoverished and abased. He returns full of these sinister apprehensions, and is confronted with a series of surprises. ‘What are these hideous black vessels?’ he asks, as he puts into the port of Brest. He is told that they are the new ironclads, the invention of the Emperor. He sees a crowd pressing towards the Mairie, and learns to his astonishment that his enslaved country possesses a legislature, and that the legislature is elected by universal suffrage. The electric telegraph, the network of railways, the embellishment of Paris, strike him at once as great and impressive strides in civilization. He finds that the cost of life has been lowered owing to a wise treaty of commerce, that imprisonment for debt is abolished, that the penal code is no longer defaced by the barbarous penalty of branding, that strikes have been legalized, that provision is made for the aged poor and for infirm priests, and that the pay of the army is augmented. These and other improvements have been effected without violence or tyranny. He expects to hear that the prisons are full of authors, and learns that he is in error, and that in Imperial France there are neither riots nor political prisoners nor exiles.
This represents the strong side of the Emperor’s policy. He had a genuine feeling for the people, and was shrewd enough to see that a programme of social and economic reform might compensate the country for the severe repression of the Republican and Orleanist parties. Clerical prejudice has minimized the admirable work done by Duruy, his Minister of Education; but on all hands it is allowed that Napoleon gave a great impetus to the construction of railways, which Thiers had denounced as the costly luxury of the rich; that by the foundation of the Crédit Foncier he brought capital into agriculture; that he drew attention to the necessity of improving out of the public funds the condition of workmen’s dwellings in town and country; that he founded benefit societies and almshouses; and that his visit to Algeria was productive of great improvements in the finance of the colony and in the relations of the French to the native population. It is he and Baron Haussmann who have made the clean, airy, brilliant Paris which we know. It was a drastic, unpopular, salutary process, affronting old prejudices, and disturbing pleasant, familiar ways of life. Who would not prefer the picturesque old rookery built under Louis Quinze, and hallowed by long family memories, to the new Boulevard, bright and staring, planned by a big, loose-jointed, harsh-featured man with long whiskers and a German name?
The first four years of the Empire were marked by steady material progress. The Emperor had been recognized by foreign powers, and in conjunction with England had carried to a successful conclusion a war for the preservation of the integrity of Turkey. At the Congress of Paris held at the conclusion of the Crimean Campaign, Napoleon appeared as the arbiter of Europe. He then stood at the summit of his fortune. He had represented the Crimean War correctly enough as conceived in the traditional vein of French diplomacy. It was to the advantage of France that Russia should not be the predominant influence in Constantinople, for to rule in Constantinople was to rule in the Mediterranean, and the Mediterranean was as much a French as an English interest. He had defended the rights of the Latin Church in the East, and accumulated a treasury of merit with the Vatican from which he intended to make long drafts. After an unpopular and ignoble peace France had emerged once more warlike and victorious, the leader of a crusade, the champion of the Latin Church, the defender of the sacred places of Palestine. The brilliance of the Imperial Court, the solicitude which the Emperor displayed for the condition of the people, combined with the peace and order which his government had secured, seemed to promise a prolonged period of uncontested and beneficent rule. His marriage with a beautiful Spanish lady had been welcome to the Catholic party, and the birth of a son was an additional touch to his prosperity. If Napoleon III had been content to act upon the maxim which he enunciated at Bordeaux and to keep the peace, it is probable that his dynasty might still be reigning in France. Unfortunately for himself, he was so far possessed of the Napoleonic tradition as to desire to reverse the treaties of 1815 and to promote the cause of nationalities. He told Lord Cowley early in his reign that ‘he was determined not to fall as Louis Philippe had done by an ultra-pacific policy; that he knew well that the instincts of France were military and domineering, and that he was resolved to gratify them’. Revolutionary schemes of foreign policy floated like storm-driven clouds across the surface of his unquiet spirit. Among Lord John Russell’s papers there is a document purporting to be a translation of a series of questions issued by Napoleon III on the possibility of a French expedition conquering and holding Australia. He threw out hints to Spain, that he might view without displeasure an invasion of Portugal, if Catalonia were ceded to France. He pressed England not once but twice to make the restoration of Poland a sine qua non of peace with Russia. Against the advice of Thouvenel, his ambassador at Constantinople, and despite the unconcealed opposition of Persigny, his envoy in London, he pressed for the union of Moldavia and Wallachia under a foreign prince, who might shape an independent Roumanian nation. On a visit to Osborne he took occasion to suggest to Prince Albert a vast redistribution of power on the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean. Spain might take Morocco, England might annex Egypt, Austria might find compensation for certain losses in Europe by the acquisition of part of Syria. By a hint here and a hint there he sowed in the minds of the diplomats of Europe the conviction that he was determined to upset the map and enlarge the boundaries of France. In his own cloudy intelligence there was always one burning question, the liberation of Italy. The problem was fatally bound up with the destinies of his house, for Italian policy marked the first stage in the road which led to the cataclysm of the Empire.
The Italian question was one of peculiar delicacy. The unity of Italy demanded not only the expulsion of Austria from Lombardy and Venice, but the expulsion of the Bourbons from Naples and Sicily and the abolition of the temporal power of the Papacy. The question was intimately bound up with French party feeling. The Radicals, led by Prince Napoleon, the Emperor’s nephew, were vehemently attached to the cause of Italian liberation, and were prepared, largely through the influence of Manin, and his friend Henri Martin the historian, to accept liberation at the hands of the Piedmontese monarchy. The Clericals, on the other hand, would not hear of any interference with the papal dominion, and, in deference to their wishes, Napoleon, when President of the Republic, had dispatched a French force to crush the Roman democracy, and to restore the Pope to his former power. He could not, then, without contradicting his earlier policy, consent to the evacuation of Rome by the French troops who had been dispatched to defend the Pope against the surging tide of Italian democracy. Nor again could the imperial government acquiesce in the expulsion of the Bourbons from Naples without grave offence to the Legitimist party, and Napoleon specially desired to seduce the Legitimists from their allegiance to the white flag. The problem, therefore, before the French Emperor was by no means simple. He wished to expel Austria from North Italy, to aggrandize Piedmont, and to indemnify France for her assistance by the annexation of Savoy. But while throwing this sop to the Nationalist and Radical parties of France, he must take care not to offend the Clericals and Legitimists. He conceived, therefore, of an Italy liberated from Austria and constituted as a federation under the nominal suzerainty of the Pope, an Italy containing as its main elements the kingdom of Naples, the Papal States, and a Piedmont stretching from the Alps to the Adriatic. It is significant of his divided will that he retained Walewsky at the head of his Foreign Office, though he knew him to be of the Clerical persuasion and opposed to the advancement of Piedmont. This was an idle dream. Napoleon underrated the strength of the national feeling in Italy, and overrated the power of France to contain it within bounds. His whole course of action was calculated to secure for France the minimum of advantage and for himself the maximum of odium. He encouraged Count Cavour to lay before the Congress of Paris in 1856 a reasoned statement of the abuses prevailing in the Papal States, with a view to exciting the indignation of Europe against an indefensible anachronism. Then, two years later, meeting the great statesman very secretly at Plombières, he pledged himself to assist Piedmont if she were attacked by Austria, and to extend her borders to the Adriatic. The war broke out in 1859, and directly led to the unification of Italy under Victor Emmanuel.
The land of Dante owes more than it is willing yet to acknowledge to the Third Napoleon. He gave the shock which set the revolutionary forces in motion; he raised the wind and reaped the whirlwind. The formation of a united Italian kingdom was, as he bitterly confessed, no political gain to France, but this was only one of the inconveniences which resulted from his descent upon the Lombard plain. The war had been vehemently opposed in his own family and at his own council board. The Empress, with the fervour of a Spanish Catholic, resisted an undertaking calculated to humiliate the Pope; while in the eyes of the official world it was the height of imprudence to encourage the revolutionary elements in Italy. England might afford to be revolutionary abroad and conservative at home; in France such a combination was justly regarded as a dangerous paradox. The Catholic soldiery distrusted the policy of the enterprise. ‘The descendants of Brennus,’ observed Mérimée, ‘are hardly in the humour to take the capital, even if it were only guarded by their ancient enemies the geese.’ The French Emperor had succeeded in alienating everybody and in creating round himself a deep atmosphere of distrust. He had suddenly made peace with the Austrians when the Piedmontese believed themselves to be on the brink of a crowning triumph. He had first encouraged, then essayed to damp the revolutionary movement in the Central Provinces. Finally, as the price of his consent to their annexation, he had exacted Nice and Savoy from Piedmont. Fiery was the wrath, deep and legitimate the suspicion, with which Italian patriots regarded his vacillating course. Excitement recks not of perplexities, and Italy never trusted him again.
Even before the outbreak of the Italian war, Napoleon had not altogether pleased the Clericals. He had declined to relax the irksome tutelage of the Organic Articles; the civil marriage was maintained; nor would he permit to the Catholics that measure of educational control for which their political leaders were striving. But now he had completely lost the clerical allegiance. He had permitted one of his publicists to write against the temporal dominion of the Pope; he had sanctioned the incorporation of the Romagna, which was one portion of that dominion, in the Italian kingdom, and had permitted Edmond About to cover the papal administration with his brilliant and pointed ridicule. The conquest of Naples by Garibaldi, and the defeat of a papal force led by a French officer at Castelfidardo, filled the Catholic and royalist world with passionate indignation; and a new Vendée organized itself under the shadow of the Vatican. And while he had thus lost the support of the great conservative connexion in France, his diplomacy had excited grave distrust among the Powers of Europe. England sympathized with the cause of Italian liberation, but could not forgive the exaction of Savoy and Nice as the price of French assistance. Palmerston revised his favourable estimate, and discovered in Napoleon a profound and inextinguishable desire to humiliate and punish this country; the Prince Consort was full of anxieties for the Rhine. The extension of the French boundary to the Alps seemed to betoken ulterior designs of the darkest nature. What if the Emperor should be meditating the recovery of the great ‘natural’ frontier which the ambition of his uncle had lost to France? Every Radical orator under Louis Philippe had clamoured for the reversal of the humiliating treaties which the sovereigns of Europe had imposed upon the restored monarchy of France. The man who had seized Nice and Chambéry would strike next at Antwerp. There was good ground for suspicion. The Regent of Prussia, who detested the Italian revolution, and had mobilized his army in 1859, believed in French designs on Belgium and the Rhine, and steadily pushed on his military preparations.
As the Italian war alienated the Clericals, so the treaty of commerce with England in 1860 estranged the manufacturers. Napoleon had been convinced by the logic of free-trade economics, and believed that by a series of commercial treaties he would be able to secure a great extension of French industry and commerce. His motives, however, were not purely scientific. He reckoned that a treaty with England would tend to dispel any clouds of dissatisfaction which might have collected over Savoy. He was aware indeed that, with the exception of the wine-growers of the South, industrial opinion was totally unprepared for such a reduction of duties as that which was embodied in the famous treaty of commerce which he drew up in concert with Richard Cobden. Nevertheless he carried through the negotiations secretly, swiftly, and in defiance of public opinion. He knew that he wanted the goodwill of England, and he believed that France would come to admit that a lowering of the tariff wall between the two great countries was all to her advantage. When Cobden told him of the statue to Peel with its inscription, ‘He bettered the lot of the labouring and suffering classes by lowering the price of the necessaries of life’, the Emperor said that that was the reward which he coveted most, but that unfortunately in France they made revolutions and did not know how to make reforms.
Having estranged the Clericals and the manufacturers, Napoleon turned to the support of the Liberals. It had been part of his original design to relax the tension of despotism when his power was thoroughly established, and by degrees to associate the representatives of the people in the task of government; and this idea was now commended to him not only by his own failure of physical health, but also by the desire of conciliating an important body of political opinion.
He had now undertaken two campaigns in Europe, as well as minor expeditions to China and Syria, and was, with part of his mind at least, prepared for a spell of Olympian quiet. The chief military lesson of the Italian war had been the need for administrative decentralization, and Marshal Randon, with the concurrence of the Emperor, had plotted out a scheme somewhat on the plan from which Roon and Moltke derived such splendid results for Prussia. But meanwhile, the finances of France had been gravely embarrassed by the Crimean and Italian wars. Two milliards of francs had been added to the debt; the deficit was chronic and retrenchment imperative. Considerations of economy had to be weighed against a project of military reform which involved fresh outlays. Doubt and hesitation began to invade the Emperor’s mind. Could not the army wait? Was this scheme really urgent? Would not fresh military expenditure be construed as a menace to the peace of Europe? It was at this moment that the King of Prussia had embarked upon a struggle with the Prussian chamber over the very question of army reform; and Napoleon, his mind already filled with a preordained plan of gracious concessions to the liberal spirit, had no desire to throw a gratuitous apple of discord into the parliamentary arena. He shrank from an unpleasant passage of arms with his subjects. He had no Bismarck at his elbow to bid him spurn the professors of economy and peace and freedom. So putting aside the heroic but expensive measure which he judged to be essential to military efficiency, he turned his attention to the composition of a life of Julius Caesar. The good tidings of this pacific employment would compose the disquieted spirits in Europe, show that the imperial sword was sheathed, and that the liberal reign had begun.
The book was to be a symptom of a new era. Napoleon was serious in his belief that, having nursed the Empire through the perils of childhood, he could afford to relax his vigilance. By a scheme of gradual concessions he would educate France in the right use of political liberty, let fresh air into the Constitution, devolve and distribute the crushing weight of parental responsibility. He would proceed cautiously, watch the effect of his graduated bounty, enjoy the harvest of confidence and popularity which ripens under the sunshine of unsolicited generosity. The spectacle of an autocrat spontaneously disarming would be a touching demonstration of careless strength and liberal wisdom. There was nothing in such a course incompatible with the root ideas of Bonapartism; it had been foreshadowed in the Additional Act, in the St. Helena conversations, in the manual of Napoleonic ideas with which Louis Bonaparte made his literary name. On the 22nd of November, 1860, the imperial historian read a decree to his Cabinet and Privy Council which altered the autocratic constitution of 1852 in certain material respects. The Senate and the legislative body were permitted to vote and debate an annual address in response to the speech from the throne, and though responsible government was still withheld, it was at least intended that the Chambers should know what the Government was doing. By the Constitution of 1852, ministers of the Crown were excluded from the Chambers. It was now provided that certain ministers without portfolio should be charged with the duty of explaining and defending the measures of the Government in the legislature. Finally, the publication of full shorthand reports of Parliamentary debates was sanctioned. By these concessions the Emperor revived Parliamentary life in France. He invited the Chambers every year to traverse the whole surface of Imperial policy, permitted a running criticism of the executive, and enormously increased the power of the Opposition in the country by allowing parliamentary oratory to be fully reported.
At the beginning of the Empire Guizot had prophesied that it would soon lose its influence over the intellectual classes in France. Writing to Reeve on the 25th of December, 1851, he says: ‘The upper classes who are interested in politics, Legitimists, Orleanists, or Republicans, will not oppose the Empire now, because they fear Socialism and the Jacquerie. But that will pass away, and then the recollection of affronts received, of liberty lost, ill-will and disdain, and party spirit, everything which renders the upper classes ungovernable, will reappear’. This prophecy was now about to be fulfilled. During the first years of the Empire the undoubted services rendered by the Government, its suppression of anarchy, the glory which it had achieved in the Crimean war, and the expansion of industry and commerce which had followed as the result not only of increased security, but also of the improvement in the railway system, the steamship service, and the mechanism of credit, had silenced the voice of detraction. But now, when the Emperor was busy over the excavation of Alesia, and discussing minute points of antiquarianism with learned men, the storm began to beat up against the fabric which seemed so imposing. The Orleanists did not forgive the decree which had confiscated the private estates of the Orleanist princes; the Legitimists were full of passionate anger at the expulsion of the Bourbon house from Naples; Liberal Catholics like Dupanloup combined with narrow ultramontanes like Pie, Bishop of Poictiers, to denounce the Emperor in pamphlets and episcopal charges; while a Liberal opposition in the legislative chamber was now invited to criticize the unsatisfactory finances, and to clamour for a larger measure of public liberty and public control than that which the Emperor had accorded. The story of the Empire during its last decade is a story of continuous decline, of unwise and ruinous diplomacy, of increasing feebleness in domestic policy, and of a series of concessions to the Liberals which had the effect of exposing its own fatal weaknesses to the unfriendly eye of a critical and restless nation.
(Continued in Part 6)
